Phaedrus — Plato

■5^ p. 224the gods are represented as committing outrageous crimes or as quarreling and fighting among themselves, on the ground that they would lead the young man to believe that quarreling is honorable and holy, and that in committing the worst of crimes he is only following the example of the greatest among the gods. He says:] Such tales must not be admitted into our State, whether they are supposed to have an allegorical meaning or not. For the young man cannot judge what is allegorical and what is literal, and anything that he receives into his mind at that age is apt to become indelible and unalterable; and therefore the tales which they first hear should be models of virtuous thoughts. s^ Ao . There you are right, he replied; that is quite essential: }*^' . but, then, where are such models to be found? and what are ^^ ^ , y the tales in which they are contained ? when that question is u^)/, ^vr asked, what will be our answer? I said to him. You and I, Adeimantus, are not poets in what we are about just now, but founders of a State : now the founders of a State ought to know, the general forms in '^ which poets should cast their tales, and the hmits which should be observed by them, but they are not bound themselves to make the tales. -^ That is true, he said ; but what are these forms of theology ^^ which you mean ?

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[The first rule to which Socrates would require all kinds of poetry to conform is, ** God is always to bcrepresented as he truly is.*' The question then arises, what is the nature of God ? Adeimantus agrees with Socrates that God is truly good and therefore cannot be the cause of evil.

Socrates continues :] Then God, if he be good, is not the author of all things, as the many assert, but he is the cause of a few things only, and not of most things that occur to men ; for few are the goods of human life, and many are the evils, and the good only is to be attributed to him : of the evil other causes have to be discovered. >> In this case theology means poetic representations of the gods.

THE REPUBLIC 22$ That appears to me to be most true, he said.

Then we must not listen to Homer or any other poet who is guilty of the folly of saying that — '' At the threshold of Zeus lie two casks full of lots, one of good, the other of evil ; " and that he to whom Zeus gives a mixture of the two — ** Sometimes meets with good, at other times with evil fortune; " but that he to whom is given the cup of unmingled ill, — ** Him wild hunger drives over the divine earth.

And again — ** Zeus, who is the dispenser of good and evil to us." . . .

Neither will we allow our young men to hear the words of iEschylus, when he says, that '* God plants 3^" guilt among men when he desires utterly to destroy a house." [Only that evil which comes as a just punishment to the #v wicked and by which they are benefited, may be attributed to \3 God.] But that God being good is the author of evil to any one, that is to be strenuously denied, and not allowed to be sung or said in any well-ordered commonwealth by old or young.

Such a fiction is suicidal, ruinous, impious. I agree with you, he replied, about this law, and am ready to give my assent. Let this then be one of the rules of recitation and invention,— that God is not the author of evil, but of good only. That will do, he said. And what do you think of another principle ?

Shall I ask you whether God is a magician, that he should appear insidiously now in one shape, and now in another — sometimes himself changing and becoming different in form, sometimes deceiving us with the appearance of such transformations ; or is he one and the same, immutably fixed in his own proper image ? 15